Katara Remembers the Massacre
by Me Or The Wallpaper
Summary: When Katara was very small, there was a woman from her village who remembered the Air benders... Rated T for a single cuss-word and a theme of grief after a massacre.


Katara Remembers The Massacre

Warnings: Mentions of a massacre, complete lack of pairings, and one cuss word.

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When Katara had been very small, there had been a woman, a friend of her grandmother's, who remembered the Air-benders.

Katara could remember hearing stories of them at night when the winds were particularly fierce and whole groups of her village would crowd together in individual tents, lighting fires and sitting cross-legged on the old, warm pelts that separated the frozen ground from them. Her name had been Akkana, and while her face had long since lost its perfect detail in Katara's memory, she remembered the voice. Old and grainy, some warble that through the years, Katara would associate with having a story to tell.

"I don't remember much about them as a whole. I mean, my father was no Chief or politician. He was just a Trader. I know that he once visited a Temple in the south and met a few monks, though I don't remember the details of that, really. It's been so very long. What I do remember is one trip he took me on to an Earth nation village. Just a small little thing. Nowhere near as fascinating as Omashu, now _there's_ a story I could tell you, my trip to Omashu… but perhaps another time."

The adults had all nodded silently. It would take Katara another year before she would grasp the true importance of telling this simpler story for the sake of the air-bender that resided now only in this tale.

"Anyway. My father was in a shop that sold wheat and nuts and a few vegetables, and he had already bought me some candy, so I was really done with that part of the trip. Like I said, it was no Omashu, but this was the first Earth Village I had visited. To me, it seemed vast and foreign, filled with these soft shades of green and brown, the air so hot and thick to me, though all the men and women and children were wearing long-sleeved clothes. I tell you, I think our blood must run differently than theirs. After so much time in the cold we must have some kind of fire in us, whereas they are all the same temperature as the rocks. And I say that with respect, Kanna, you don't' have to look at me like that, that wasn't prejudice in the slightest."

"But I was wandering around in my undershirt and skirt and positively wishing for some rain, at least- when I saw another little girl and a little boy who seemed to be just as unhappy with the heat as me. At least, I thought they must be. They were wearing some sparse kind of clothing as well. I remember neither of them had hair. That was really what shocked me- at the time I thought that maybe Earth nation folk just don't grow any sometimes. I didn't know, at this point, that there were air benders here."

"So I walked up to these two young folk- and I just have to mention, they didn't have that arrow on their heads, I say that because I heard all the time that air benders have an arrow, but these folk had none, and this absence was really why I didn't know immediately that they were air benders- and I said 'Hey, why don't you have any hair?' … stop looking at me that way, Kanna, I was an insolent little brat and I know it, I'm not going to lie to the children for the sake of my image."

"Well, the girl, she looks up at me and says, sharp as a whip, 'Why do _you_ have hair?' Well, this seriously stumped me. I was suddenly all nervous, thinking maybe kids my age in the Earth nation just weren't supposed to grow any at all. I mean, I hadn't seen any my age in the market this early in the morning. They were the first ones. So, thinking maybe they'd be so impressed with how foreign I was they'd forget about the hair, I said '_I _come from a Water-bending nation.' I didn't say which because, truth be told, I was a little brat, like I said, and found ours to be very boring. I was encouraging them to think of a more impressive one and assume."

"Anyway, the girl- Kia, I'd learn her name was- said to me 'We come from here. We were born in an air temple, though, but our mother and father moved here. We're just kids. Kids don't grow out their hair. But I'll grow out hair if I want to when I'm older.' She said coolly. Well, now it was my turn to be impressed. But I didn't want to believe her just yet, just in case she was lying. 'Bend some air, then.' I said. She threw me a look and said 'I'm not an air bender. I'm just from an air-bending nation. Are all people from the water-bending nations water benders?' And they _weren't_, obviously, and those that _weren't_ included me, so I just held my tongue. She turned to the little boy, though, who was maybe three, and she said '___ he's a bender, though. But he's just small, so he's not that good at it yet.'"

"The little guy didn't seem good at nothing besides staying silent and chewing on his fist, so I said 'Yeah, sure.' In a voice that really conveyed my disbelief. But that baby took that fist out of his mouth and looked at me the same sharp little indignant glare that his sister possessed, and he made this motion with his hand- you have never seen a baby make such a practiced and dainty little wave, mark my words. And then there was this breeze, sharp and quick and cool, running over my face as if he'd brought some arctic to me in an instant."

"Anyway, I laughed, because with something as cool as that was, it's easy to forget any awkward beginnings. So the day went on and Kia and I talked and her brother never said a word. I learned that they were planning to return to their Temple at the end of the warm season for the sake of Kia and the little tyke's schoolings, especially the baby, who needed to learn to be an air bender on top of that."

There had been a long pause were all were silent. Katara could remember her Gran-gran crying, slightly. She had been born a few years after the last of the air benders had disappeared.

"Of course," the old woman had continued, "I never heard from them again. When my father first told me the news after he came back from a trip to Omashu, I couldn't really believe him. It didn't seem possible that an entire nation was gone. Even more than that, funnily enough, it didn't seem possible that those two kids were dead. I was young. I didn't believe in things like the death of a child, even though it had already happened in our very village- a young boy had fallen through a crack in some thin ice when I was around four. Still, it seemed impossible. There were thousands of Air benders. It didn't seem that difficult at all for two kids like Kia and her brother to slip through the radar. 'Besides,' I had offered up to my father when trying to explain this, 'there must be more air benders who were just living in the Earth nation. Or another water nation. Or even in the fire nation or some swamp or desert or island in the middle of nowhere. It can't be that all where just there for the fire nation to light up.'"

"And he said 'You're right, of course,' and he hugged me. I remember he started crying. I had been sacred shitless- oh, um, I mean, very scared, sorry. There's nothing quite as terrifying to a child as a sobbing parent. Especially a sobbing father. My father was a big, strong man, and here he was, holding me so tight I thought I'd break, sobbing onto _my_ shoulder. I kind of patted him on the back a bit. He wanted so very much to believe that it was not that easy to get rid of an entire race."

"And perhaps it wasn't. There must have been air benders in other places for a while, though we learned an ugly truth a little while later, when it began to be the water-benders who were disappearing, one by one. My father's trade business collapsed. The towns he used to visit were turning him away. I suppose it made sense- some of the more horrible fire-benders might have burned a town to the ground by association."

"And perhaps there were air benders still there before- perhaps Kia's parents had heard the beginning of what was going on and had tried to stay, but that hadn't worked, of course. Maybe the town had tried and failed to hide them, and had learned the hard way not to go against the Fire Nation. I know if an air bender had been here, we would have had more than a few issues with hiding it. Hey, don't look at me that way, you know perfectly well it's true. It's a poor mentality we as humans- not as individual benders- possess in times like that."

"Well, more like 'we as living things,' because perhaps a penguin would do the same damn thing. We step back, we turn away as long as it's not _us_ being brought away in chains, hoping that our own forced ignorance will make it never be us. If an air bender had been here, we would have handed them over to the Fire Nation because _we_ are not Air benders. Because _we_ have children and loved ones who we can't afford to loose for the sake of someone who is not one of us. Perhaps now it is different, now that it is us that the Fire Nation wants. Perhaps, if we were given a second chance today, we would see an Air bender as kin simply because it would be both of us hunted."

There had been silence in the tent. Katara could still remember the older people crying and the parents staring with the same fixed fascination their children had.

Time had gone on. Akkana had died of natural causes associated with old age. Water benders disappeared, one by one. Katara lost her mother and her father, in different ways.

She grew up fast. Perhaps Sokka was older, but she was the one who became the adult in the family, almost overnight. There were times when Katara would look at the sky- at night, perhaps, when the stars seemed to swallow the world and paint all the ice silver- when she would think of a nation she had never known and feel some sharp edge of pain she hadn't been able to even remotely comprehend when she was a child, around five years ago.

The most pain seemed to come when she thought about one fact, though. One selfish fact- she would cry and hurt and shake more about her mother's death, about her father leaving, and about a few dead friends than she ever grieved for the Air Nation. She mentioned it once to Sokka when they had been pulling in fishing nets. He had given her the startled, nearly defensive look that seemed to fall onto his face whenever they got too close to grief and said 'That makes sense. It's normal. I mean, it's not like we ever knew any air benders. They were real to the old people. To us, it was more like a legend or folk tale.'

Sokka's head had ducked, and she had seen his breath run from his nose in two clouded streaks, lips tight closed, eyes glaring down at the net tangled around both of their hands. She hadn't mentioned it again.

But at night, staring up at the velvet dark sky- staring at the pricks of stars, so very many stars, and the almost tangible light of the moon on the ice, she would ache for her own lack of grief. Because when did a massacre stop being real? When did the death of a small girl named Kia- who would have been _dead_ by now anyway- stop mattering?

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A/N: I have no idea. Popped into my head and onto my computer, seriously. Also- while I love Avatar, I do not know… every detail of it by heart. So if I messed up the canon in some way, I apologize. Also- no beta. I apologize. I tend to not use them for one-shots. And I know my grammar tends to suck, so if I made a mistake, I'm sorry.

Besides that though, I hope you enjoyed it. Regardless of whether or not you did, I would love to know what you think in order to either feed my ego or refine my writing skill.


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